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Might want to watch for OpenOffice 2.0. I've been using Open Office for quite a while now and certainly there are a few bugs/issues that need to be resolved, they certainly have come a long way. A recent review I read seems to indicate a beefed up Open Office 2.0 will be a serious contender to MS Office.

Well here goes...

Office 2003 is by far the best offering Microsoft has made yet in this area. No duh, it's the latest version. Personally, I think Outlook is a great PIM solution, if it weren't for such a crappy email engine. The exception to this statement is Outlook with Exchange, with both workstation and server properly configured, protected, etc. yada yada ad naseum.

I installed Open Office for the first time a few days ago, and was very impressed. Then I (scanned, filtered, scanned, analyzed, prayed, and ) downloaded a .DOC attachment and opened it in the word processor.

But all the documents I've created from scratch are beautiful. I'm a big fan of Excel for lists, data sorting, etc. Haven't tried the spreadsheet thingy from Open Office yet.

But I will not pay $500 for the office suite. I simply don't get that much use out of the damned thing. Office really is a professional suite of applications, geared towards office productivity.

My mother-in-law was insistent recently that I get Office installed on her new computer because "she couldn't do anything with it" except for surf and play Zuma. She wouldn't even open Works 7 which came with the PC from Compaq.

Office is pretty, shiny, effective, and Microsoft spends a lot of effort making it more functional, but I can write a resume in Vi just as easily, I simply don't have as many font options.

Additionally, I will usually recommend a client consider it, at least for user productivity. But there's a reason you only see a few copies on the shelf at the software store.

"Data is not necessarily information. Information does not necessarily lead to knowledge. And knowledge is not always sufficient to discover truth and breed wisdom." --SpafAnyone who is capable of getting themselves made president should on no account be allowed to do the job. --Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
"...people find it far easier to forgive others for being wrong than being right." - Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore

I have. I use it for my grade sheets and it works very similar to Office. And I haven't had any issues opening Excel sheets in Open Office or vice-versa. I can't say the same for the Open Office presentation portion (Impress). This is why I'm hoping that 2.0 is as good as they say. Apparently there were big beef-ups in that area. The pictures and apparently the features are similar to Office.

I do wonder if this will result in a potential lawsuit (the Writer portion looks very similar to Word).

Oh.. and if anyone's wondering it's Linux Pro Magazine, February 2005 issue if they want to see highlights, screenshots and read the review.

I love openoffice and even loved Staroffice (pre sun) for the basics but since so many clients standardize on MS, I have a hard time getting openoffice to jive with all but the most basic formatting structures. Tables in particular.

Crossing fingers the future versions can get closer as I'm sure clients would love the savings.